Taking credit where none is due is an old habit among the genus homo politicus. We tend to assign blame, or award credit where it isn’t due and the politician who says, “Not me, it’s great, but I had nothing to do with it” has yet to file papers to run for office.

Two recent books on the 2012 presidential campaign have found their way on to my bookshelf. “Double Down” by the authors of “Game Change” reads with the brisk pace of a spy novel. It’s cliff-hanging gaffes and blown debate opportunities, it’s Hamlet-like candidates and calculating “players in waiting,” climaxing on election night as Karl Rove melts down on Fox, unable to believe that Mitt Romney has lost Ohio. High drama.

“The Gamble” reads slowly and it’s full of graphs. The forces that brought about the Obama victory had nothing to do with the Clown Car primary season, the 47% video, etc. The two candidates were equally matched, the money behind them was roughly equivalent. Both campaigns were professionally managed and in the end the margin of victory was two percent of the popular vote. “The Gamble” posits the idea that Romney’s candidacy was a gamble with poor odds to pay off.

“The Gamble” makes a persuasive case that we sort ourselves into two camps, Republicans and Democrats, and that defections from our usual political alignment is a rarity. The “fractured” Republicans weren’t. The Clown Car primary was reflective of a lukewarm response to Romney, but in the end virtually all Republicans voted for Mitt. Four percent of Republicans jumped ship to Obama, while two percent of Democrats abandoned Obama. Independents, likewise, fall to the left or the right and follow that inclination when/if they vote.

The shifting polls were snapshots in time, not trends, but they gave us something to read about. The underlying story remained the same and The New York Times’ statistician Nathan Silver, in his 538 column, correctly called it for Obama in early fall, noting that the economy kept chugging along, slowly on the uptick and there were no serious defections. “The Gamble,” using a wide sampling of opinion and other metrics, after the fact, showed the same.

It will be interesting to watch next year as Rick Scott claims credit for the improving Florida economy; things will be better. That Scott can take no credit whatever is beside the point. Scott cannot pull the levers to have any real effect upon the state economy, those levers reside in Washington. Three years ago economists who follow Florida wrote papers to show that if Scott did nothing, his 700,000 jobs would fill themselves and that, regardless of Scott’s efforts, the state’s economy would come back. It’s just a matter of time before he lays claim to the credit for it. Will the voters buy it? If the money they can spend is equal, if “The Gamble” is correct, they will and that will make the difference.